When you're the stay-at-home mother of an infant, you spend almost no time alone, and thinking goes out the window, unless you count anxious fretting over when to start solid foods and how to persuade the baby to go down for a nap. It's unclear to me now why I imagined this wouldn't be a difficult adjustment.
If someone had told me when I was 25 years old that one day my husband and I would be parents to three sets of twins, I would have laughed out loud. At the time—it was 1988—my husband Bruce and I had been married about three years. We were very much in love, building our relationship upon mutual trust, love, respect, humor and faith in God. We also had a very active, healthy and happy sex life, but we hadn't yet decided it was time to start our family.
Being a parent is a central part of many women's lives, and YourTango has covered it from all perspectives: deciding when to have kids, sex after kids, trying to "have it all," and more. Below, a selection of our best posts on motherhood (and fatherhood—afterall, you can't make a baby without a father).
A father imagines his daughter's future boyfriends. "My elder daughter, who's 12, is just beginning to show an interest in boys, and since it's every man's dream to have his little princess marry a guy just like her father, I'm trying to craft a personal ad to attract the ideal candidate. Though my daughter's dating debut is 10 years down the line (at least), I find that I have a problem: I am horrified by the man I envision her with. Because, in reality, who the heck would date me? Then again, the kid could do worse..."
In Bad Mother, author Ayelet Waldman encourages women to aspire to be "not bad" mothers and resist the pressure to meet the extremely high standards of success that society has for women and motherhood. Waldman wants women to stop trying so hard and just be. She argues that mothers can and should be honest, flawed, and, yes, selfish sometimes—your ability to care for your children will not suffer. Discuss: Which is harder: marriage or motherhood?
Mama's boy or not, your husband's mother had first dibs on your guy even before you were old enough to walk, let alone say "I do." Now that you're married, there are a few things she'd like you to know about the man you now call your own.
The past 25 years have left women's plates increasingly—some might argue, precariously—overloaded, as they try to keep healthy portions of career, love and family. In her upcoming new book, "In Her Own Sweet Time: Unexpected Adventures In Finding Love, Commitment, And Motherhood," New York City journalist Rachel Lehmann-Haupt explores the expanding buffet of choices that exist for women hoping to "have it all" today.
![A 9/11 Widow's Unique Memorial [VIDEO]](http://images.tangomag.com/sites/default/files/imagecache/node-full/image_embedded_video/AmericanWidow.jpg "A 9/11 Widow's Unique Memorial")
This is the story of Alissa Torres and her graphic novel, American Widow, illustrated by Sungyoon Choi, which describes her personal experience as a 9/11 widow and single mother.
A story about a dysfunctional relationship; between a recently divorced woman and her bedroom closet. Part of moving on for her meant ditching the old her and that woman's wardrobe. Losing wait and a general make over were only part of it, there was a sentimentality attached to her old clothes. So, as Katrina Heron began to appreciate the importance of clothes she decided that getting over the divorce meant reclaiming her sexuality by dressing sexy and dressing single meant feeling single.
Blogger Crush: AAG LoveStage: Divorced & Starting Over AAG, aka Always Aroused Girl, is the blog of a midwestern mother, recent divorcee and sexpert. At the end of this month her blog will be three years old, and if you visit before September 15 you can enter her contest to win a bevy of sex toys from Babeland. But it's not just sex toy giveaways that have us crushing on AAG (although she does give away quite a bit of swag). We love her blog's down-to-earth mix of sexuality, motherhood, and general life observations.
Expectant mothers have enough to worry about before giving birth: prenatal vitamins, home vs. hospital delivery, whether to become a stay-at-home mom or go back to work. Teen mothers have their own set of additional concerns, and now, it seems, so do mothers giving birth via Caesarean section. Via Jezebel: a recent Yale University study found that mothers who gave birth naturally have higher levels of brain activity in areas that signal motivation and emotion than those who underwent a C-section.
